Posted on 02/23/2007 3:24:50 AM PST by abb
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- McClatchy Co. (MNI) said total revenue in January fell 5.2% from a year earlier, driven by a 5.8% fall in consolidated advertising revenue in the month. Pat Talamantes, the company's chief financial officer, said the fall was disappointing, but not surprising as the comparison was against a strong month in the previous year. "January is our toughest monthly comparison for the whole of 2007," he noted.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Ping
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070223/mcclatchy_revenue.html?.v=1&printer=1
AP
McClatchy Jan. Revenue Falls 5.2 Percent
Friday February 23, 6:34 am ET
McClatchy Posts 5.8 Percent Drop in January Ad Sales, Total Monthly Revenue Falls 5.2 Percent
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- McClatchy Co., the nation's third-largest newspaper publisher, said Friday total advertising revenue fell 5.8 percent in January and total revenue slipped 5.2 percent, compared with a year-ago period adjusted for newspapers purchased in the Knight Ridder acquisition and excluding the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper.
"We knew going into January that we faced one of the toughest periods for advertising revenue comparisons in the industry given our strong 5.2 percent growth in pro forma revenue in January 2006," said Pat Talamantes, McClatchy's chief financial officer. "Indeed, January is our toughest monthly comparison for the whole of 2007. So while we are disappointed with an ad revenue decline of 5.8 percent, we were not surprised by it."
Retail advertising edged up 0.2 percent for the month, but national ads dropped 18.4 percent to $17.5 million from $21.4 million last year. The company also saw a 23.3 percent decline in automotive advertising and an 8.2 percent drop in real estate-related ad revenue.
McClatchy operates 31 daily newspapers and about 50 non-dailies, including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, Kansas City Star, the (Fort Worth) Star-Telegram, Charlotte Observer, and the (Raleigh) News & Observer. McClatchy also owns and operates McClatchy Interactive, which provides Websites with content, publishing tools and software development; Real Cities, a national advertising network of local news Websites and 15 percent of online job site CareerBuilder.
If these numbers keep up, in 20 years they will have to pay people to accept a newspaper.
These critical segments with the largest ad budgets are down huge. Craigslist has eaten away the classifieds.
All that's left are coupons, supermarket inserts (used mostly by my grandmother's generation) and the mail/pak type clients (eg, roofers, gutter shield, replacement windows, checks-by-mail, maid service, etc)
The past couple of years I had been posting that the Dinosaur Fishwrap controllers would look back at those bad years as good years.
We have friends and relatives, who are not conservatives, who are cancelling fishwrap subscriptions and magazine subscriptions as they tired of the recycle hassle and costs for out of date news and how to's.
Mostly it's because I'm fed up with the naked liberal slant with in the news stories. I'm fine with lefty editorials, it's the obvious bias in the news stories themselves that make me angry.
My local paper (The Colorado Springs Gazette) thinks of itself as a conservative paper (it has quite a few conservative columnists), but it prints verbatim the idiotic slosh that comes in from the wire services. If they hired someone to edit the hate-Bushisms and anti-military tenor out of those stories, they'd pick up considerable new (and old) support in this very conservative and very military town.
Newspapers brought financial woes upon themselves, says Craigslist boss
The newspaper industry has brought its financial troubles on itself, according to the chief executive of Craigslist, the company that has been accused of decimating the newspaper industry's advertising business.
Jim Buckmaster told weekly technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that his business was not responsible for publishers' problems. He said that a focus on money and profits has in fact damaged their business.
"I think it's exaggerated to say that Craigslist has had a devastating impact on classifieds revenue," said Buckmaster. "Newspapers as an industry are still twice as profitable as the average United States industry."
Newspapers had a pre-internet monopoly on readers' attention which meant that classified advertising became an extremely profitable part of their business. Since the advent of classified advertising, online margins have been eroded. Since the almost entirely free Craigslist became utterly dominant across the US, publishers say margins have plummeted.
"Journalism as practiced at newspapers has been hurt by an excess of money over the years as you've seen newspapers bought and sold and consolidated into large chains run by corporate managers to maximise profit, and increasingly over decades have resorted to running wire stories, putting an ever-greater proportion of advertising into their newspapers and shying away from writing hard-hitting stories about corruption in high places," said Buckmaster. "The financial position of newspapers has not declined, it has more plateaued."
Craigslist is run on unique lines. Though it is a company and it does generate profits, the aim of Buckmaster and company founder Craig Newmark is explicitly not to earn money. "Our goal is to maximise utility for users, so we concentrate on doing what users ask us to do and little else. We do want to run a healthy business and we do have a healthy business, but beyond that maximising profits and revenues has never been a primary goal. It's unfathomable to the financial community and Wall Street, it's antithetical to their whole world view, it's sacrilegious."
Buckmaster was in the UK to talk about Silicon Valley culture to the Edinburgh University Entrepreneurship Club. His advice to entrepreneurs was to be patient.
"Patience was something which put us in a subset of one during the initial internet boom when the emphasis was on trying to grow to great size as quickly as possible by any means possible," he said. "The notion of internet time, everything's moving quickly – we found the contrary, we weren't in any hurry at all and we've never done anything to accelerate the growth in terms of advertising or anything like that."
"You don't have to be in a big rush as long as the trend is going in the right direction, and if you keep your costs low it gives you far more flexibility than you otherwise would have," he said. "Once you have outside investors you're not in control of the company and the range of options you'll have will be very circumscribed."
While almost all of the commercially minded dotcom companies of the first internet boom went bust having never made a profit, Craigslist has been profitable for seven years, Buckmaster said.
It is in the top 10 English language websites by traffic, it serves six billion pages a month to 10 million users, yet it only employs 23 staff. It is those low costs which have kept it in business.
"It was fairly ironic, 100% of dotcoms were geared toward trying to achieve an IPO and make a lot of money and 99% or more of those companies went bust without making a nickel," said Buckmaster. "Craigslist was never about money, and yet we were one of the very few that came through the bust and have done well year after year."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.